By this act, two places have been created, thereby illustrating a basic principle of cosmo-topo-logy: there is never merely one place anywhere, not even in the process of creation. It is as if cosmogony respected the general rule enunciated by Aristotle in another connection: “the minimum number, strictly speaking, is two.”35 To create in the first place is eo ipso to create two places. This principle is at work in the very first sentence of 1 Genesis (“God created the heavens and the earth”), and it recurs twice again even before the description of the separation of sea and land. First, God “separated the light from the darkness” (1:4), thereby creating two great domains that are not only temporal but spatial in character. Second, the creation of the “firmament,” that is, the vault of the sky, or Heaven, calls for separating “the waters from the waters” (1:6), those of the sea from those of the sky. Two aqueous realms signify two distinct places for water to be.
In the space of a few lines and following the bivalent logic of place-creation, then, we witness a surprisingly complicated beginning of the known world. In effect, Genesis maintains that a twice redoubled doubling of place occurs in the course of creation. For Heaven to become separate from the Earth, the creation of the firmament requires the prior dissociation of two regions of water; and the earth, to be truly Earth, in turn requires a distinction of land from sea. No simple matter this! In particular: no lack of place to begin with!
Thus there is no creation from a void or creation as a void. God is not creating from a preexisting abyss of nothingness. Things are already around when He begins to create—things in the guise of elemental masses, the watery Deep, darkness upon the face of that Deep, the predeterminate earth. Nor does God empty Himself in a kenotic move to constitute a void within His own being. In the germinal account of Genesis there is neither void without nor void within.
In place of the void are places, and all the more so if regions count as places, as surely they must. Already extant are domains of deepness and darkness. Indeed, at play here is the Spirit of God, which in “moving over the face of the waters” must ineluctably be moving among places. For there is no movement without place. As Aristotle says, “There cannot be change without place,”36 and movement is certainly a kind of change. God, in moving over the dark Deep, is already moving over a place as well as between places. He is moving, for example, between the beginning-place and the end-place of his own cosmogonic journey. These ur-places, though unnamed in the text, preexist the more particular places that are named.
In fact, we may distinguish three levels of place within the first chapter of Genesis: (1) the ur-places presupposed by the very activity of God Himself, as sources of His movements; (2) the elemental regions of darkness, the Deep, and the unformed Earth; and (3) the formed regions of Earth as dry land, the Seas as the waters that have been “gathered together into one place,” and the regimes of Day and Night. It is clear that the Old Testament account gives us a picture of creation as arising in an already given plenitude of places; and it describes as well a certain cosmic progression from one place to another—or, more exactly, from one kind of place to another. Creation, in short, is not only of place (and of things stationed in places) but cannot occur without place, including its own place-of-creation. The act of creating takes place in place.
This is not, of course, the whole story. As creation continues, yet other sorts of places emerge. These subsequent or consequent places are progressively more definite in character. They include the places of the sun and the moon, “the two great lights” that “rule over the day and over the night and separate . . . the light from the darkness” (1:14–18); of the birds that “fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens” (1:20); of sea monsters “with which the waters swarm” (1:21); of the “beasts of the earth” (1:25); of “every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth” (1:29); and of the human beings who are given dominion over all of these creatures and things” (1:26–28). When it is added in the second Book of Genesis that “a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground” (2:6) and that “God planted a garden in Eden, in the east” (2:8), we attain a still more definite degree of place-determination, one that now includes quite particular places (i.e., patches of ground) that have proper names and even cardinal directions.
In the progression just sketched, a pattern of cosmogenesis emerges which is common to many theories of creation: rather than from no-place to place simpliciter, the movement is from less determinate to more determinate places. It is only a step farther to call for measurable place as well—as happens, for example, in Job.
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?37
The origin of “geometry”—literally, earth-measurement (geō-metria)—lies in place: above all, in its ever more precise delimitation as natural boundaries give way to the imposed and regular configurations, the “limit-shapes,” of the builder and the surveyor.38 This is not to say that on this paradigm measuring is merely posterior to creation: it is itself an act of creation. To measure is to create. This bold equation will be repeated in other texts concerning creation, as we shall observe in one particular case in the next chapter.
For the moment, I want only to draw attention to the fact that in the inaugural creation text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, place is both ubiquitous and multifarious—and that its unfolding is even presented in a quasi-progressive (but not simply successive) manner. The void is evaded, and in its stead we find a proliferation of cosmogonically significant places, each of which is essential to the progress of the narrative of creation. Does this narrativized proliferation of places betray an effort to paper over the abyss of the void? If it does, it only repeats a gesture found elsewhere—beginning with the way we handle our own place-panic. For who can face the void? An absolute void cannot be faced (in either sense of this term). God Himself, as Genesis avers, can move only over a Deep that already possesses a face. He faces the Deep only insofar as its own face is already traced out upon its dark surface.
IV
It gives as great a shock to the mind to think of pure nothing in any one place, as it does to think of it in all; and it is self-evident that there can be nothing in one place as well as in another, and so if there can be in one, there can be in all.
—Jonathan Edwards, “Of Being”
Is this to say that cosmogonic accounts never begin expressly with a void? The citation from a Hopi creation myth that stands as an epigraph to this chapter shows that such a beginning indeed can be made. For the Hopi, “the first world,” that is, the first state of the world, is precisely that of Tokpela, “endless space.” Tokpela is conceived as an “immeasurable void” that has no beginning or end; no time, shape, or life. Once given the prospect of endless space, however, no time is wasted in the attempt to change that space into something less appallingly empty. The awesome void is just what creation must transmute—which is precisely what Taiowa, the Hopi creator-god, proceeds to do.
Then he, the infinite, conceived the finite. First he created Sotuknang to make it manifest, saying to him, “I have created you, the first power and instrument as a person, to carry out my plan for life in endless space. I am your Uncle. You are my Nephew. Go now and lay out these universes in proper order so they may work harmoniously with one another according to my plan.”
Sotuknang did as he was commanded. From endless space he gathered that which was to be manifest as solid substance, molded it into forms.39
The task is so immense that Taiowa creates a younger and stronger person